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Cream of Cauliflower
This is made the same as cream of celery, dividing the flowers into small sections, cooking and straining, and proceeding the same as in the other cream soups.
This entry is shorthand: the book expects you to have read its cream of celery and to carry the same method over to cauliflower. What follows fills in the standard cream-soup formula of the period and the few places where cauliflower behaves differently from celery.
- The method it points toA cream soup of this era generally means a thin white sauce let down with the vegetable cooking liquid: something on the order of 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour, then about 2 cups milk and 2 cups of the cauliflower water, with the sieved pulp stirred in. Seasoning in such recipes is usually little more than salt and white pepper, sometimes with a blade of mace or a slice of onion infused in the milk.
- Do not overcook the cauliflowerThis is the hinge. Boiled too long, cauliflower turns sulfurous and dulls in colour, and the flavour carries straight into the soup. Simmer the florets in lightly salted water only until a knife slips in, and keep the cooking liquid.
- "Dividing the flowers into small sections"Break the head into small florets; the tender part of the stalk can be peeled and sliced and used too, though it needs a few minutes longer than the flower. A head of roughly 2 lb trimmed will give enough pulp for a small tureen, but the recipe itself specifies no quantity.
- StrainingThe original means pressing the cooked vegetable through a sieve or food mill, which leaves the coarse fibre behind. A blender or stick blender gives a smoother result; pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the texture the book intended.
- Keep it below a boil once the milk is inA hard boil can make the milk look curdled and slacken the body of the sauce. Bring it just to steaming and hold it there.
- GarnishSet aside a dozen small florets before puréeing and drop them into the finished soup. Some books of the period also finish such soups with a spoonful of whipped cream, or a little scalded cream stirred in off the heat.
- YieldThe reconstructed quantities above would make roughly 5 to 6 cups, four to six first-course servings; the original states no yield.
Cream soups built on a flour-and-butter base with milk were a staple of American household cookery from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s, and compilations like this one often printed them in families: one full recipe, then a string of one-line variations for celery, cauliflower, asparagus, corn, pea and spinach -- which is exactly what this entry is. The economy of the form suited a cook who could learn one ratio and apply it to whatever was to hand. Cauliflower was generally dearer and more delicate than cabbage in this period. The word cauliflower derives ultimately from Latin caulis, stem or cabbage, and flos, flower, and the book's "flowers" for the florets is in keeping with that older usage.